Radio 1983:
During this time from 1979 to 1983, my friends & I had become somewhat notorious in Baltimore. As "Tim Ore" I'd premiered the "B.T.O.U.C." (BalTimOre Underground Club) & had an article about in the front page of an early edition of the Baltimore Sun, one of the 2 daily papers at the time. The 1st track here is an actual news report on this event on a local easy listening station. I'd been invited by WJHU DJ Steve Stec (see the "Radio 1979" notes) to do a piece for his "Pop Tones" radio program & an article entitled "'Tentatively' speaking, 'mad scientist' takes to the radio" appeared in the Baltimore Sun the morning of the day of the program.
The piece I made for the show was called "PAUSE FOR (Radio Play Only)" & consisted of just that: station IDs from whatever radio stations I could receive in my apartment in South BalTimOre separated by 'silence'. The idea was that listeners would see the newspaper publicity, try to tune into the program & only hear static & station IDs from other stations. They would then think that they'd tuned into the wrong station & try to find the right one. Their unintentional participation in the program's content, their tuning of the radios, would then become the actual content of the program. It was to be my way of tricking them into participating by using their radio as an instrument.
When I arrived at the station, a very irate station manager accosted me & Steve. The article had been read by JHU personnel & they were alarmed as to what I might do. I had deliberately left my plans mysterious in my interview for the article. When I was asked by reporter Robert M. Green "Is it obscene" I replied to the effect of "Well, if it's obscene, it's obscene in the way radio is always obscene" by which I meant that one could say that the commercialism of radio is obscene. I surreptitiously recorded my interaction with Steve & the station manager - who demanded to have the tape so that he & a panel of concerned JHU censors could listen to it. They were completely confused by what they heard & were initially unconvinced that this was my 'real' tape. I think what they expected was something like 'Kill the Pigs!' - something rather unlikely to be coming from me.
After listening to the tape, the station's lawyer was called & he vetoed the playing of it. Steve was then suspended from the station for 2 weeks for inviting me on without asking for permission from the station administration 1st. Of course, it was NOT station policy that such permission was required & guests came on all the time without it. In fact, I doubt that ANYONE had ever been required to ask for permission before. This 'rule' was made up specifically to exclude me. Track 2 here is of that clandestine recording & Track 3 is of the actual "PAUSE FOR (Radio Play Only)" program. While the piece was prevented from airing on its intended premier date, a version of it that included an excerpt from the secret tape was published by banned Productions in LA & THAT version DID eventually receive airplay somewhere.
Around this time, I was lovers with one JHU DJ & became friends with another one: Ron Cummings (aka RAN of NAR). RAN & I had similar interest in stretching the boundaries of what people would listen to. It was probably sometime in July that I proposed to my lover & to RAN that we drive from WJHU (88.1FM) to the radio station of the University of Maryland, WMUC (88.1FM), a drive of approximately 45 minutes away, & that we keep the car's radio on 88.1 & record whatever was played on the radio between the 2 stations. I'd originally wanted to do this as a cross country trip. The idea was to have the continuity of the frequency with the discontinuity of whatever radio stations could be picked up on it on the journey.
On the initial drive down either the radio got slightly detuned &/or we got slightly lost so the end station of the trip was WAMU instead of WMUC. We then went to MUC where we explained our project to the DJ on the air at the time & turned around to come back. Track 3 begins with his allusions to us.
By the end of July, RAN proposed that he present a NINE HOUR program of my material. This was extraordinary of him & hadn't happened before or happened since. More or less all of my recordings of the time were extremely different from what most people expected from 'music' - which was why RAN liked them. RAN went to great lengths to make this program even more unusual by making special cartridges from the TESTES-3 material (see "Radio 1979") & by processing the other tapes he played. The excerpt here (broken into Tracks 6 & 7) is from 2:40 to 4:15AM & has material from a "Lacquerland" performance (a performance by myself & my collaborator Herr Brain) while getting high from brushing lacquer on at our hard-wood floor finisher job. The other piece presented is realizations of my 1976 "dadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadada".
By September, I had been arrested & become international 'news' as a 'cult leader' for my "Poop & Pee Dog Copyright Violation" performance in the same railroad tunnel where I'd inaugurated the B.T.O.U.C.. RAN was my collaborator on that. I was a member of JHU at the time. RAN & others at the station were amused by the idiocy of the 'news' 'reportage' & put a foto of me performing the 'ceremony' on some copies of JHU's program schedule. Track 8 is one of RAN's shows done at the time in which he plays a recording that he'd done with the dead dogs that I'd found in the tunnel - amongst other things. Shortly thereafter, I was "involuntarily quit" from the radio station at the instigation of one of the more humorless DJs.
At the time, JHU was a wonderful community station. It was only something like one watt so it didn't broadcast very far. It wasn't long before ONE paid employee was brought in from out-of-state & all the community DJS were let go. The humorless DJ stayed on & continued on to JHU's replacement after the station was done away with altogether. He's been a jazz DJ for decades now. I wonder how many people realize what a sell-out he really is.
I was living in a neighborhood full of street drunks & other desperadoes in South BalTimOre & most of the buildings around me were deserted by their owners. As such, they were occupied by the drunks who were a VERY violent crowd. Instead of calling the cops on them (we shared an alleyway & a courtyard so I had plenty of contact with them) I was friendly with them even though they were bad neighbors to an extreme. They were always fighting & trashing the whole area. Nonetheless, I thought "live & let live" or some anarchist variation on that. My windows got broken by them & I STILL didn't call the cops. After all, I was pretty desperate at the time too. I could relate.
One of the more psychotic drunks, Norman, had taken a dislike to me & took it upon himself to threaten me & to try to blackmail me. He had come into the apartment during the "7th International Neoist Apartment festival" that I organized in 1983 & imagined that he'd learned something from that that he could blackmail me WITH. I talked about this with some of the other drunks who'd grown to respect me & they offered to beat him up for me. I declined on their offer but I think they did it anyway. After that Norman really had it in for me. On October 28, 1983, I caught Norman unscrewing the lightbulb on my porch. I then overheard him talking with one of the other drunks saying something to the effect of "force him to kill". Since I was very vulnerable & since, as an anarchist, I STILL didn't want to call the police, I called RAN at JHU instead & we recorded Tracks 9 to 12 of me talking about the situation while RAN played various musics that he thought were appropriate or funny. These tapes then became part of a performance that I eventually did with some of the drunks. My place was torched a year & a half later by an arsonist. I think the arsonist was hired by the assistant to my landlord.
- December 4, 2012E.V. notes from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
During this time from 1979 to 1983, my friends & I had become somewhat notorious in Baltimore. As "Tim Ore" I'd premiered the "B.T.O.U.C." (BalTimOre Underground Club) & had an article about in the front page of an early edition of the Baltimore Sun, one of the 2 daily papers at the time. The 1st track here is an actual news report on this event on a local easy listening station. I'd been invited by WJHU DJ Steve Stec (see the "Radio 1979" notes) to do a piece for his "Pop Tones" radio program & an article entitled "'Tentatively' speaking, 'mad scientist' takes to the radio" appeared in the Baltimore Sun the morning of the day of the program.
The piece I made for the show was called "PAUSE FOR (Radio Play Only)" & consisted of just that: station IDs from whatever radio stations I could receive in my apartment in South BalTimOre separated by 'silence'. The idea was that listeners would see the newspaper publicity, try to tune into the program & only hear static & station IDs from other stations. They would then think that they'd tuned into the wrong station & try to find the right one. Their unintentional participation in the program's content, their tuning of the radios, would then become the actual content of the program. It was to be my way of tricking them into participating by using their radio as an instrument.
When I arrived at the station, a very irate station manager accosted me & Steve. The article had been read by JHU personnel & they were alarmed as to what I might do. I had deliberately left my plans mysterious in my interview for the article. When I was asked by reporter Robert M. Green "Is it obscene" I replied to the effect of "Well, if it's obscene, it's obscene in the way radio is always obscene" by which I meant that one could say that the commercialism of radio is obscene. I surreptitiously recorded my interaction with Steve & the station manager - who demanded to have the tape so that he & a panel of concerned JHU censors could listen to it. They were completely confused by what they heard & were initially unconvinced that this was my 'real' tape. I think what they expected was something like 'Kill the Pigs!' - something rather unlikely to be coming from me.
After listening to the tape, the station's lawyer was called & he vetoed the playing of it. Steve was then suspended from the station for 2 weeks for inviting me on without asking for permission from the station administration 1st. Of course, it was NOT station policy that such permission was required & guests came on all the time without it. In fact, I doubt that ANYONE had ever been required to ask for permission before. This 'rule' was made up specifically to exclude me. Track 2 here is of that clandestine recording & Track 3 is of the actual "PAUSE FOR (Radio Play Only)" program. While the piece was prevented from airing on its intended premier date, a version of it that included an excerpt from the secret tape was published by banned Productions in LA & THAT version DID eventually receive airplay somewhere.
Around this time, I was lovers with one JHU DJ & became friends with another one: Ron Cummings (aka RAN of NAR). RAN & I had similar interest in stretching the boundaries of what people would listen to. It was probably sometime in July that I proposed to my lover & to RAN that we drive from WJHU (88.1FM) to the radio station of the University of Maryland, WMUC (88.1FM), a drive of approximately 45 minutes away, & that we keep the car's radio on 88.1 & record whatever was played on the radio between the 2 stations. I'd originally wanted to do this as a cross country trip. The idea was to have the continuity of the frequency with the discontinuity of whatever radio stations could be picked up on it on the journey.
On the initial drive down either the radio got slightly detuned &/or we got slightly lost so the end station of the trip was WAMU instead of WMUC. We then went to MUC where we explained our project to the DJ on the air at the time & turned around to come back. Track 3 begins with his allusions to us.
By the end of July, RAN proposed that he present a NINE HOUR program of my material. This was extraordinary of him & hadn't happened before or happened since. More or less all of my recordings of the time were extremely different from what most people expected from 'music' - which was why RAN liked them. RAN went to great lengths to make this program even more unusual by making special cartridges from the TESTES-3 material (see "Radio 1979") & by processing the other tapes he played. The excerpt here (broken into Tracks 6 & 7) is from 2:40 to 4:15AM & has material from a "Lacquerland" performance (a performance by myself & my collaborator Herr Brain) while getting high from brushing lacquer on at our hard-wood floor finisher job. The other piece presented is realizations of my 1976 "dadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadada".
By September, I had been arrested & become international 'news' as a 'cult leader' for my "Poop & Pee Dog Copyright Violation" performance in the same railroad tunnel where I'd inaugurated the B.T.O.U.C.. RAN was my collaborator on that. I was a member of JHU at the time. RAN & others at the station were amused by the idiocy of the 'news' 'reportage' & put a foto of me performing the 'ceremony' on some copies of JHU's program schedule. Track 8 is one of RAN's shows done at the time in which he plays a recording that he'd done with the dead dogs that I'd found in the tunnel - amongst other things. Shortly thereafter, I was "involuntarily quit" from the radio station at the instigation of one of the more humorless DJs.
At the time, JHU was a wonderful community station. It was only something like one watt so it didn't broadcast very far. It wasn't long before ONE paid employee was brought in from out-of-state & all the community DJS were let go. The humorless DJ stayed on & continued on to JHU's replacement after the station was done away with altogether. He's been a jazz DJ for decades now. I wonder how many people realize what a sell-out he really is.
I was living in a neighborhood full of street drunks & other desperadoes in South BalTimOre & most of the buildings around me were deserted by their owners. As such, they were occupied by the drunks who were a VERY violent crowd. Instead of calling the cops on them (we shared an alleyway & a courtyard so I had plenty of contact with them) I was friendly with them even though they were bad neighbors to an extreme. They were always fighting & trashing the whole area. Nonetheless, I thought "live & let live" or some anarchist variation on that. My windows got broken by them & I STILL didn't call the cops. After all, I was pretty desperate at the time too. I could relate.
One of the more psychotic drunks, Norman, had taken a dislike to me & took it upon himself to threaten me & to try to blackmail me. He had come into the apartment during the "7th International Neoist Apartment festival" that I organized in 1983 & imagined that he'd learned something from that that he could blackmail me WITH. I talked about this with some of the other drunks who'd grown to respect me & they offered to beat him up for me. I declined on their offer but I think they did it anyway. After that Norman really had it in for me. On October 28, 1983, I caught Norman unscrewing the lightbulb on my porch. I then overheard him talking with one of the other drunks saying something to the effect of "force him to kill". Since I was very vulnerable & since, as an anarchist, I STILL didn't want to call the police, I called RAN at JHU instead & we recorded Tracks 9 to 12 of me talking about the situation while RAN played various musics that he thought were appropriate or funny. These tapes then became part of a performance that I eventually did with some of the drunks. My place was torched a year & a half later by an arsonist. I think the arsonist was hired by the assistant to my landlord.
- December 4, 2012E.V. notes from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
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